Cryptonomicon

But all of the cars on this train have doors, guarded by men in unfamiliar uniforms, and windows, shrouded on the inside with shutters and heavy curtains. The Gestapo lead him to a coach door without breaking stride, and just like that, he is through. And he is alone. No one checks his papers, and the Gestapo do not enter behind him. The door is closed behind his back.

Doktor Rudolf von Hacklheber is standing in a long skinny car decorated like the anteroom of an upper-class whorehouse, with Persian runners on the polished hardwood floor, heavy furniture upholstered in maroon velvet, and curtains so thick that they look bulletproof. At one end of the coach, a French maid hovers over a table set with breakfast: hard rolls, slices of meat and cheese, and coffee. Rudy's nose tells him that it is real coffee, and the smell draws him down to the end of the car. The maid pours him a cup with trembling hands. She has plastered thick foundation beneath her eyes to conceal dark circles, and (he realizes, as she hands him the cup) she has also painted it onto her wrists.

Rudy savors the coffee, stirring cream into it with a golden spoon bearing the marque of a French family. He strolls up and down the length of the car, admiring the art on the walls: a series of Dürer engravings, and, unless his eyes deceive him, a couple of pages from a Leonardo da Vinci codex.

The door opens again and a man enters clumsily, as if thrown on board, and ends up sprawled over a velvet settee. By the time Rudy recognizes him, the train has already begun to pull out of the station.

"Angelo!" Rudy sets his coffee down on an end table and throws himself into the arms of his beloved.

Angelo returns the embrace weakly. He stinks, and he shudders uncontrollably. He is wearing a coarse, dirty, pajamalike garment, and is wrapped up in a grey wool blanket. His wrists are encircled by half-scabbed lacerations embedded in fields of yellow-green bruises.

"Don't worry about it, Rudy," Angelo says, clenching and opening his fists to prove that they still work. "They were not kind to me, but they took care with my hands."

"Thou canst still fly?"

"I can still fly. But that is not why they were so careful with my hands."

"Why, then?"

"Without hands, a man cannot sign a confession."

Rudy and Angelo gaze into each other's eyes. Angelo looks sad, exhausted, but still has some kind of serene confidence about him. Like a baptizing priest ready to receive the infant, he holds up his hands. He silently mouths the words: But I can still fly!

A suit of clothes is brought in by a valet. Angelo cleans up in one of the coach's lavatories. Rudy tries to peer out between the curtains, but heavy shutters have been pulled down over the windows. They breakfast together as the train maneuvers through the switching-yards of greater Berlin, perhaps working its way around some bombed-out sections of track, and finally accelerates into the open territory beyond.

Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring makes his way through the car, headed towards the rear of the train, where the most ornate coach is located. His body is about as big as the hull of a torpedo boat, draped in a circus-tent-sized Chinese silk robe, the sash of which drags on the floor behind him, like a leash trailing behind a dog. He has the largest belly of any man Rudy has ever seen, and it is covered with golden hair that deepens as the belly curves under, until it becomes a tawny thicket that completely conceals his genitals. He is not really expecting to see two men sitting here eating breakfast, but seems to consider Rudy and Angelo's presence here to be one of life's small anomalies, not really worth noticing. Given that Göring is the number-two man in the Third Reich--the designated successor to Hitler himself--Rudy and Angelo really should jump to attention and give him a "Heil Hitler!" But they are too stunned to move. Göring stumbles down the middle of the coach, paying them no mind. Halfway down, he begins talking, but he's talking to himself, and his words are slurred. He slams open the door at the end of the coach and proceeds into the next car.

Two hours later, a doctor in a white coat passes through, headed for Göring's coach, carrying a silver tray with a white linen cloth on it. Tastefully arrayed on this, like caviar and champagne, are a blue bottle and a glass hypodermic syringe.

Half an hour after that, an aide in a Luftwaffe uniform passes through carrying a sheaf of papers, and favors Rudy and Angelo with a crisp "Heil, Hitler!"